The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

  Pham often sat on Jacques’s right. Although he hated physical training, he had become supple and strong. Although he enjoyed sophisticated conversation and improving on reality by means of poetic fancy, he had become down-to-earth and even slightly brusque.

  When they left camp Jacques Sellier, the son of a colonial administrator, had invited him home. His life as an impoverished student had been transformed. The Selliers were extremely affable; they considered that their religion gave them certain duties towards others and, like Anglo-Saxon parsons, they were inclined to play a role that was something between a director of conscience and a sports trainer. They had seven children; Jacques’s younger sister was called Béatrice. She was not very pretty, but had an indefinable adolescent charm. Every morning Pham and his friend went for a run round the Great Lake; they would come home panting and exhausted.

  Béatrice used to say:

  “You’re like a couple of puppies scampering after the wind and coming back with nothing. Tomorrow I want some flowers . . .”

  Pham had brought her some flowers. She had smiled and kissed him on the cheek.

  The young Vietnamese had fallen in love with Béatrice and did not hide it from her.

  One day Jacques had said:

  “Let’s not go running today. Come for a stroll round the garden.”

  Pham still remembered the blaze of the flamboyants, the pale grey colour of the sky and the acid pear-drop flavour of the morning air.

  With his hands thrust into the pockets of his shorts, Jacques hung his head and kicked up the sand in the path with the toes of his sandals.

  “Pham, my parents have asked me to talk to you about Béatrice. You know, she’s only seventeen and nothing but a tomboy . . . and any idea of your marrying her is out of the question.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re Catholics and for us everyone, whatever his race, is equal and alike . . . in principle . . . but . . .”

  Pham had felt the sort of ice-cold blast that heralds a bout of fever. Jacques had gone on:

  “It will be difficult for me to see you again for some time. Oh, come along now, don’t take on so. If you could only see your face! It’ll work out all right in the end. You’ll forget Béatrice, you’ll marry a girl from your own country.”

  Pham had left without a word. His friendship for Jacques and what he believed to be his love for Béatrice had turned into a deep-rooted secret hatred for all whites, especially those who tried to bridge the gap between the two races and then fought shy.

  At this juncture he was approached by some of his university friends at Hanoi who belonged to the Indo-Chinese Communist Party. After its suppression in 1940, the Central Committee had been obliged to withdraw to China and the students were getting slightly out of hand. They harboured a sense of injustice and dreamed in a vague way of the independence of their country and of splendid destinies for themselves. Pham had followed them. He had the same feeling of resentment, the same ambition and not a vestige of political education.

  But one morning a man had turned up from Tien-Tsin. He had assembled the students and had given them the latest international directives of the Komintern.

  “From now on the Communist Party must take the lead in every national liberation movement and unite the maximum number of nationalist and socialist organizations in the struggle against Fascist imperialism.”

  And Pham was the one whom the Central Committee’s envoy had made responsible for initiating his comrades into the Vietminh programme as it had been worked out in the depths of China by a certain Nguyen-Ai-Quoc who was now known by the name of Ho-Chi-Minh.

  He could recite the three points of this programme by heart:

  “We must get rid of the French and Japanese Fascists and aim at the independence of Viet-Nam.

  “We must establish a democratic republic of Viet-Nam.

  “We must form an alliance with the democracies which are opposed to Fascism and aggression.”

  To Pham Fascism had assumed the brawny muscular form of Jacques Sellier.

  But Jacques Sellier did not die as a Fascist. At the time of the Japanese advance he and two other scouts had joined a guerrilla band organized by a half-caste lieutenant. He had been wounded and the bandy-legged little soldiers of the Mikado had finished him off. Pham had never forgiven him, either, for meeting such a noble end.

  He had already become a true Communist and he felt that outside the Party there could be neither hope nor heroism.

  • • •

  The halt lasted until early in the afternoon. Captain de Glatigny, banana thief and former staff officer, lay stretched out in the grass. He was dreaming vaguely of a number of things, of his comrades and of Lescure who had left them.

  On the eve of his departure for hospital Glatigny had sat beside the madman who was teasing a cricket with a blade of grass. The captain had suddenly had the impression that Lescure was re-establishing contact with the real world. He called out to him in a parade-ground voice:

  “Lescure! Lieutenant Lescure!”

  Lescure went on playing with the cricket and, without raising his head, gently answered:

  “To hell with you, captain. I don’t want to know anything, I don’t want to be told anything and I’m perfectly all right, thank you.”

  To be like Lescure! To reject all the anxieties, all the problems to which modern life was bound to subject every officer, to adopt the favourite bureaucratic formula: “I don’t want to know”—how restful that would be!

  The prisoners had to leave the trail to negotiate some slippery little mud embankments which ran between the bright green rectangles of the paddy-fields, past screens of bamboo and clumps of mango, banana and guava trees. Darkness was beginning to fall and lent a limpid crystalline transparency to the atmosphere.

  It was then the two men appeared, emerging from behind a screen of trees. They were naked to the waist, clothed only in a cheap ke-kouan of uncertain colour and, to prevent themselves from slipping, they walked with their toes spread out like ducks. They were carrying a huge black pig suspended from a bamboo pole and moved extremely fast, trotting along with a loose-limbed gait like all Vietnamese peasants. But they were far taller, and their skin was not the colour of virgin oil but looked greyish and dull. One of them wore a sort of blackish beret on his head, and the other a grotesque hat made of rice straw.

  They caught up with the column by a short cut, lowered the pig and the pole to the ground, rounded on a bo-doi who tried to make them move on, and watched the pitiful procession of prisoners with profound interest and unmixed pleasure.

  “Here, I say, Esclavier,” said the one with the beret. “What are you doing here, sausage-face?”

  Esclavier recognized that slightly rasping voice and also the expression “sausage-face,” but not the man with the translucid complexion, whose skinny body could not have weighed more than 130 pounds. Yet it could be none other than Lieutenant Leroy of the 6th BCP who had been reported missing at Cao-Bang—the athlete who had run away with the army athletics championship in spite of his 200 pounds’ weight.

  Esclavier ran his tongue over his dry lips.

  “Don’t tell me it’s you, Leroy?”

  “It’s me all right, and the chap at the other end of the pig is Orsini of the 3rd BEP. We’ve been expecting you for several days.”

  “Are we still far from the camp?”

  “A mile or two. So long, sausage-face, we’ll come and see you this evening What the hell does this damned little bo-doi think he’s doing, pushing me around? And the peace of the people, what about that, you little monkey? It’s your duty to re-educate us, all right, but that doesn’t mean you can push us around.”

  “Im! Im!”

  Disconcerted by the assurance of the two old hands and the flood of words they let fly at him, the bo-doi calmly allowed them to pick up their pig and bamboo pole
and move on. With their fast trotting gait they soon left the column behind them and disappeared behind a screen of trees.

  A Tho village appeared with its houses raised on stilts among the trees.

  “Halt!”

  The column came to a standstill. Each group leader was ordered to count his men and then went and reported to the Voice. He was accompanied by another Viet, as squat and bandy-legged as a Japanese. A sort of map-case hung on his skinny buttocks. His name was Trin; he was the general supervisor; the head warder of Camp One. He was ruthless, brutal and efficient, and the Voice knew he could trust him implicitly.

  The Voice was sensitive and certain things repelled him; Trin made himself responsible for these. The Voice was the pure conscience of the Vietminh world, Trin was the material element.

  The Voice embarked on a speech:

  “You have reached your internment camp. It is useless to try and escape. A certain number of your comrades captured at Cao-Bung have tried more than once. Not one of them succeeded and we had to take severe disciplinary measures. Now they have come to their senses and have mended their ways. You are here in order to be re-educated. You must take advantage of this stay in the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam to instruct yourselves, discover the evil of your errors, repent and become fighters for peace. From now on you will have some of your former comrades as group leaders. We have selected them from the ablest among them.”

  “Dirty rats,” Esclavier muttered through clenched teeth.

  “You must obey them, follow their instructions . . . I also have a splendid piece of news to announce. The new French Prime Minister, Mr. Mendès-France, appears to be inspired with the best intentions with a view to signing the armistice.”

  “Who’s this fellow Mendès?” Pinières asked Glatigny.

  “An awkward character, who has always been in favour of the evacuation of Indo-China. I personally regard him as a sort of Kerensky, only less beguiling.”

  “I know him,” said Esclavier, “on the strength of having met him once or twice in England, when he was with de Gaulle. He’s ugly, brittle and conceited but at least he fought, which is pretty rare for a politician; he’s intelligent, which is rarer still, and he’s got character, which is exceptional.”

  “But a man like that won’t ever sign the armistice,” said Lacombe dejectedly.

  “He’s a Jew,” said Mahmoudi contemptuously, “and a Jew might do anything. There are no Jews here with us.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Esclavier, “as a matter of fact there are two: a captain who fought extremely well and who’s no different from any of us, and a crackpot lieutenant who dreams of stuffing himself with cakes and being made a librarian at the Nationale so as to be able to spend the rest of his life reading.”

  Each team was quartered in a hut on stilts. On the far side of a tributary of the Bright River which the last storm had swollen and filled with mud, the prisoners could see the neat lines of huts of Camp One.

  The officers taken prisoner at Cao-Bang had been living there for the last four years; ninety of them had survived.

  Lacombe lowered himself on to his bunk with a deep sigh:

  “Well, we’ve got here at last: we may as well make the best of it. I really thought I was done for and I’m sure if it hadn’t been for Pinières and you others . . .”

  “Balls to that,” the lieutenant muttered. “Whatever you say, you’re part of the army and a comrade and that’s why we helped you.”

  “What’s happened to Boisfeuras, I wonder?” Glatigny asked.

  “Boisfeuras has got out of tighter spots than this,” Esclavier replied. “He was once in the hands of the Japs for three weeks . . . and he came through all right. I once had a brush with the Gestapo, we compared our experience. His was . . . slightly more refined, shall we say?”

  Lieutenants Leroy and Orsini turned up shortly afterwards, still as unconcerned as ever. Out of their pockets tumbled some bananas and tobacco and an old copy of l’Humanité.

  “L’Humanité’s not for reading,” said Orsini, who was short, thickset and swarthy, “it’s for rolling cigarettes.”

  “How did you come by all this stuff?” Merle asked.

  “How do you think? We pinched it, of course!”

  “In the interest of reciprocal rights,” Orsini explained.

  “Now here’s the dope,” said Leroy. “Your team seems to have a pretty bad reputation, since the group leader they’ve chosen for you is little Marindelle, who couldn’t be better at the job.”

  “Marindelle!” Orsini said delightedly. “That’s someone to conjure with.”

  “A bastard, is he?” said Glatigny. “That name seems to ring a bell.”

  “A stool-pigeon?” Pinières asked.

  “Our best friend,” said Leroy. “Officially the number one collaborator of the camp, but actually he could be called the head of the Resistance.”

  “He’s got the right idea,”—Orsini scratched round his armpit and brought out a louse which he crushed between his thumbnails—“to get the best of the Viets you’ve got to humour them and give them confidence in you. He’s a double, a triple, a quadruple agent. He has got the best of everyone, the Viets, the Camp Commander, the Meteor, us and perhaps himself as well.”

  “You’d better spread it around,” Leroy went on. “Potin, another group leader, is a Communist. He turned Communist here. He believes in it quite sincerely, but he makes a point of behaving decently and setting a good example. Ménard, on the other hand, is an absolute bastard, an out-and-out swine.”

  “This is the difference we draw between them,” said Orsini. “Potin we’ll bump off but we’ll shake his hand first, and afterwards we’ll see to his wife and kids. Ménard we’ll do to death by slow degrees and then dump him in a shit-house.

  “Fabert’s a chap who doesn’t give a damn so long as he’s left in peace and there’s no trouble. Trézec’s a bible-thumper and a dreary bore: always preaching, but for his own church, not the Viets.” Geniez is the only pederast in the camp and it’s not his fault. So he’s a progressive. Most people can’t stand him, but I’ve seen him fight and I know that he’s then a lion.

  “Ah, here comes that dear little bastard, Marindelle.”

  They made a face at the new arrival, got up and disappeared.

  6

  THE VIETMINH

  “My name’s Marindelle,” he said, “Yves Marindelle, a lieutenant in the 3rd Foreign Parachute Battalion . . .”

  He was naked to the waist and every rib showed in his skinny chest. He had a tuft of fair hair on the top of his head, which made him look like one of those comic music-hall characters: Tufted Riquet or Cadet Rousselle . . . His beedy little eyes sparkled with intelligence. He squatted down on his haunches in front of the team:

  “I’ve been detailed as your group leader and as such I’m responsible for initiating you into camp regulations and supervising your re-education.”

  “To hell with you,” said Esclavier in measured tones.

  In spite of all he had heard about him, he did not take to the lieutenant at all.

  “You must never say that to the Vietminh. What you must say is: ‘I don’t understand and I’d like you to explain.’ They love explaining. Your team has made a bit of a name for itself. The Meteor . . .”

  “We call him the Voice,” said Pinières.

  “Well then, the Voice accuses your little group of three attempts to escape, constantly failing to comply with orders, theft and even a racial squabble.”

  “That was in order to pinch some molasses,” said Mahmoudi, “I told him that.”

  “What’s more, you’ve got a war criminal and a madman with you. The war criminal will be back with you tomorrow after he has made his public self-examination and cleansed himself of his sins by Marxist confession. But where’s the madman?”

  “In hospita
l already.”

  Marindelle scratched his throat:

  “He’ll be better off there; Dia will look after him. He’s a very good doctor and has worked miracles. I’ve been through his hands myself and his herb soups put me back on my feet. Tomorrow there’s an instruction period for the whole camp. You’ll meet your old friends from Cao-Bang and be initiated into camp routine. I was given to understand that Captain de Glatigny was with you.”

  “Yes, I’m Captain de Glatigny.”

  Marindelle’s voice underwent a sudden change; it became apprehensive. He was no longer Cadet Rousselle, but a crumpled adolescent.

  “May I have a word with you in private, sir? It’s something personal.”

  Glatigny got up. Pinières noticed that in spite of his rags and exhaustion he still looked as elegant as ever. He wished he could have looked like that himself.

  The two officers climbed down the ladder from the hut and went and sat down in the shade of the big banana trees.

  “We’re vaguely related,” said Marindelle, “. . . through your wife. I married Jeanine de Hellian, whose father . . .”

  “Now I remember . . . I thought your name sounded familiar.”

  “I’ve been without news of my wife for four years. I left for Indo-China three months after we married and then came Cao-Bang.”

  “I imagine she’s waiting for you just as all our wives are waiting for us, bringing up their children, helping one another and visiting the wounded in hospital.”

  “No. Jeanine isn’t waiting for me and I haven’t any children.”

  “It’s just come back to me . . . I believe I met her in Paris about a year ago, at my place.”

  “Is she as lovely as ever?”

  “I remember a slender girl with long hair which she twisted into a plait and wore on one side of her head.”

  “You see, she’s gone back to the way she wore her hair before she was married, and yet she knows that I’m alive and a prisoner. She never writes to me.”